Creator Bio
Jack Levine
1915–2000
The son of immigrants from Lithuania, the painter Jack Levine was born in Boston’s South End and grew up in Roxbury. He attended Harvard, where his painting first attracted attention. He was a figurative painter, but his bold use of color and distortion of forms stamped him as a modernist. Much of his painting was overtly political, skewering politicians, capitalists, military men, and racists. After World War II and the Holocaust, he began to paint works with specifically Jewish content. Notable among them was a series of miniature portraits of biblical kings and postbiblical scholars.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
The Neighborhood Physician
Levine was a figurative painter known for his political and social commentaries about economic inequality, capitalism, and political power. He painted in a distinctive cartoonish style in which people…